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The Magic Flute
By Michael Van Duzer
Visual artists have long been fascinated with The Magic Flute,Mozart's whimsical, convoluted mess of an opera. Chagall designed a famous production for the Metropolitan in the Sixties, and in recent years David Hockney and Gerald Scarfe's imaginations have created wildly different worlds for Mozart's fairy tale characters.
Opera Pacific chose to kick-off their fifteenth season with a revival Maurice Sendak's distinctive interpretation of the piece. Although opening with sweetly cartoonish vision of a dragon chasing our hero, Sendak takes the piece seriously and respects the background of the opera's composition. To that end, his set designs incorporate the vaguely Egyptian trappings of the libretto while his costumes echo Maria Theresa's court: powdered wigs for the Queen of the Night and Masonic aprons on Sarastro's followers. Director Dorothy Danner is perfectly in step with the designer, underplaying the more slapstick elements of the plot with clean and clear blocking that humanizes the characters.
David Miller's Tamino is tall and attractive with just the right amount of vacancy in his eyes to make his trials believable. Vocally Miller has a sweet blandness that suits a fairy tale Prince and does justice to the music. Pamela Armstrong makes a strong impression as Pamina, caressing Mozart's vocal line with limpid tones and revealing the emotional heart of the opera. Jan Grissom's Queen of the Night dispatches her fiendishly showy arias with astonishing assurance and only the occasional stray note. Kevin Langan's Sarastro is well sung and authoritative while Beau Palmer's Monstatos is slightly underpowered. Frank Hernandez is a well-sung Papageno without the extraneous schtick that so often makes this role tiresome. Christina Suh piped prettily as Papagena.
Carl St. Clair, from the Pacific Symphony, conducted the orchestra with enough dignity and dash to elucidate the various colors, textures and, above all, the sublime magic of Mozart's score.
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